The Epic of Manas is the monumental Kyrgyz oral epic, the first and central part of a trilogy that continues with Manas's son Semetey and grandson Seytek. It tells how the hero Manas gathers the scattered Kyrgyz tribes into a single people and wins them back a homeland. Among the longest epic poems in the world, with the fullest recorded cycles of the trilogy running to roughly half a million lines, it survives not as a fixed book but as a living tradition that specialist reciters called manaschi rebuild in performance, never reciting it the same way twice.
There is no book of Manas. There is only the singer. A manaschi is not trained into the art so much as claimed by it, often after a dream in which the hero appears and commands him to sing. Then, with no text before him, he chants for hours or even days, rebuilding a poem longer than the Iliad and the Odyssey many times over. No two performances are ever the same, because nothing is memorized word for word. A nation's founding epic, longer by some counts than any other on earth, has for most of its life existed nowhere but in a living human voice.